Turnabout

by Margaret Peterson Haddix

  For a fleeting moment Amelia wondered if she really had died. This was not at all how she had pictured heaven, but things had been so strange lately, maybe it was. Why, she could kick off her bed covers at night now. She could rise up on her arms once again and look out the window. Maybe heaven was only about small improvements.

  Around her everyone started to grumble at once: “I never signed anything!” “Documents? What documents?” “I said I’d give my body to science after I died, not before!”

  Dr. Reed reached behind him for a thick notebook. “Your waivers are all in here. You may inspect your signatures afterward if you want.” His voice carried a chill in it. “Some of you begged me to be involved in this experiment.”

  The grumbling grew louder. “I don’t remember begging!” “Doctors!”

  Dr. Jimson stepped forward.

  “Please,” she said. “I know this isn’t an easy situation to grasp. The fifty of you are pioneers of sorts, and Dr. Reed and I aren’t entirely sure how to handle things either.” Dr. Reed flashed her a look of scorn, evidently for revealing any weakness or uncertainty. But the crowd quieted down. “I think it’s best if you let us explain the situation fully, and then we can talk about what to do.”

  She waited for total silence. Dr. Reed started to speak, but she flashed him a look that shut him up too.

  “All of you are participants in Project Turnabout,” Dr. Jimson continued. “We explained the experiment when we got your permission—and we did get your permission, though many of you apparently don’t remember it now. Given the changes your bodies have been through, it would be perfectly understandable if you have some short-term amnesia. We’ll be testing for that.” She paused. Everyone waited. “Now, about your families. They know that your bodies were to be donated to science, but they weren’t given all the details. Between the fifty of you, you have something like a thousand descendants, and this is a secret project for reasons you, most of all, should understand. So, initially at least, we didn’t feel we could let them know everything. And, um, we’re still not sure about the final outcome, so we didn’t think it was fair to anyone to make your families grieve twice.”

  With a grasp of subtlety she thought she’d lost, Amelia realized what Dr. Jimson meant: They still might die soon. Even after their miraculous revivals. Even with their longer telomeres, whatever those were.

  A man in the back raised his hand. “I guess you don’t want other scientists knowing what you’re doing afore you get your Nobel Prize or whatever. I can see that,” he drawled slowly. “But my boys are factory workers. They ain’t a-gonna tell no one. It don’t seem fair. . . .”

  Dr. Reed gave Dr. Jimson a let-me-handle-this-one look. She stepped aside.

  “Mr. Seaver,” he called to a man not far down the row from Amelia. “Where does your son work?”

  “TV station down in Cincinnati,” he said.

  Dr. Reed nodded. “And Mrs. Burn-Jones, what about your grandson Eddy?”

  “The National Enquirer,” she muttered.

  Some people snickered. Dr. Reed smirked.

  “You all have been in nursing homes for a while—some of you for a dozen years or more. But you remember tabloids, don’t you? Can’t you picture the headlines? ‘Ninety-year-olds Drink from Fountain of Youth,’ ‘Nursing Home Patients Gain Immortality’—the media wouldn’t leave you alone. You’d have to live like freaks in a circus. We keep this secret, you can have normal lives.”

  Amelia wondered how he could say that so confidently. She’d had a normal life, and she’d pretty much finished it. Normal life ended in death. What was he doing talking about immortality?

  “Is that what’s going to happen?” someone else asked. “Are we immortal now?” Amelia thought she heard equal measures of fear and hope in his voice, but perhaps that was only what she felt.

  “We don’t know. You’re still susceptible to accident or disease, but it’s very unlikely now that you’ll die of old age. The injections we gave you, a formula we’re calling PT-1, caused laboratory animals to live indefinitely, and in much more youthful states. We took very old rats, gave them the shots, and then gave them more shots when they unaged to about middle age. We think we can keep them at the rat equivalent of twenty-five or thirty practically forever. And that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, before you all got distracted. You’re going to be able to walk again. You’re going to be able to see well again. You’re going to be able to hear. I don’t know about immortality, but I can promise you this: You’re all going to be young again.”

  All the patients began to talk at once again, and the doctors made no attempt to stop them. Then a quivery voice somehow floated above the noise:

  “Dem bones, dem bones gonna

  Walk around. . . .”

  One by one, everyone else stopped talking and listened to the eerie voice.

  “Dem bones, dem bones gonna

  Walk around.

  Dem bones, dem bones gonna

  Walk around. . . .”

  Suddenly recognizing the song, Amelia wanted to giggle. If she were younger, she thought, she’d have half a mind to join in. Then she remembered: She was younger. Her voice cracking, she sang along on the last line:

  “Hear the word of the Lord.”

  From their blank expressions Amelia could tell the doctors had spent more of their childhoods in science classes than at Sunday school. She glanced back at the woman who’d been singing: Her shrunken face was a mask of wrinkles, and a tiny smile was the only evidence that she’d said anything at all. Amelia decided the explaining was up to her.

  “It’s from the Bible,” she said. “Ezekiel. He was a crazy prophet in the wilderness, and God showed him a pile of bones and told him, ‘I can make them all come to life again.’ And Ezekiel prophesied, and what God said happened. The bones all joined together into skeletons and got bodies and skin and hair and everything, and stood up and were alive again.”

  “Then what?” Dr. Reed asked. He’d gone a little pale. “What happened next?”

  Amelia thought about it.

  “I don’t remember exactly,” she said. “I think Ezekiel just starts talking about the fate of Israel.”

  Somehow it had never occurred to her to wonder how the skeletons felt about being brought back to life.

  A woman in the back suddenly hollered out, “This is against the will of God! You’ve denied me my entrance to heaven!”

  “No, no, we never—we wanted . . . ,” Dr. Reed started to explain. But he had to stop to mop sweat from his brow.

  Over the hubbub the same voice that had sung rang out again, “Aw, come on, Louise. How do you know they haven’t saved you from hell?”

  Then it was hopeless, the doctors had no chance of getting anyone’s attention again. Amelia saw Dr. Reed lean over and whisper to Dr. Jimson. Amelia thought she could see well enough again to read his lips—he said, “Get them out of here!”

  As Amelia’s chair was being pushed out of the room, she passed the stretcher of the woman who’d sung. The woman turned her head and grinned at Amelia. “I’m Anny Beth Flick,” she said. “Don’t you just love to see people all riled up?”

  April 21, 2085

  Melly and Anny Beth went out dancing to celebrate Melly’s birthday. They hardly needed any excuse for dancing anymore. It was like some rhythm sang in their bones all the time, secretly urging, “Dance. Run. Move. Get going!” Melly went jogging every morning now, and Anny Beth did aerobics three or four nights a week, but somehow that wasn’t enough. They’d talked about it; neither one of them remembered the dancing urge being quite so powerful the first time.

  “But there were always chores then,” Melly had said. “All those buckets of water I had to lug up the hill . . . all the grain we thrashed by hand . . . I used to fall into bed too worn out even to sleep.”

  “Not me,” Anny Beth had said, with her usual ornery grin. “I always had energy at night.”

  Melly had playfully slugged her.

>   They were acting more like kids now. Melly knew that. She thought about Ms. Simmons’s pursed lips and knew how she’d view Melly and Anny Beth’s behavior. But what was she going to say—“Act your age”? Which age?

  They stepped into the dance club now, their silver boots gleaming in the strobe lights. The crowd in front of them was a blur of tie-dye, neon polyester, and smiley-face prints. Melly figured that this was about the fifth time in her life that the fashions of the 1970s were “in.” What was so enduring about all those psychedelic daisies that they kept coming back? This time, though, the look always had to be paired with what Anny Beth called “futuristic Reynolds Wrap.” No one else in the dance club remembered foil, of course, since aluminum had been mined out years ago. Melly caught a glimpse of herself in the mirrored walls. With her short, fitted silver dress and glittery eye shadow and multi-colored hair, she looked just like a “Predictions of the Future” fashion display she’d seen several decades ago. Had the fashion futurists been so wise that they knew what was coming, or had these fashions come into style simply because that was what people predicted? Were all successful prophecies self-fulfilling?

  Melly thought about sharing her musings with Anny Beth, but decided against it. “What are you doing, thinking again?” Anny Beth would say. “It’s your birthday. We’re at a club. Dance.”

  It was too loud to talk anyhow. Melly threw herself into the music, jerking her limbs alongside dozens of other anonymous bodies.

  Hours later Anny Beth leaned over and shouted in Melly’s ear. “—eat?” was all Melly caught. Melly nodded. They went to a restaurant next door and ordered the largest platters of burgers and fries available. Melly’s ears were still ringing when their food arrived.

  “If I really were a teenager with decades ahead of me, I would not be ruining my ears like that,” Melly said. “I can’t believe what those kids do.”

  “Oh, don’t be such an old lady,” Anny Beth said. “Irresponsibility is what adolescence is all about.”

  Melly snorted. “Which psychology book did you read that one in?”

  That had been one of their latest projects, reading about adolescence so that they could blend in better. They’d mostly found the books hilarious, as if describing a species of animal they’d never encountered. Each of them had been a teenager before, each of them had raised teenagers—but they’d never seen anyone act like the books said all teenagers behaved.

  Anny Beth paused to smile suggestively at a guy a few booths away. He smiled back but didn’t approach. Melly wondered how she and Anny Beth could look and act so much like typical teenagers, but still give off such forbidding vibes.

  A camera crew walked up the aisle and stopped beside the guy Anny Beth had smiled at. “And now,” one of the men in the crew said dramatically into a microphone, “more about Peter’s life! We’ll follow him all night long! See every second of his existence!”

  Peter beamed into the camera.

  Anny Beth rolled her eyes. “Just another publicity hound.”

  Melly counted the other camera crews in the restaurant—there were ten in sight, and probably at least that many out of her view.

  “Isn’t everyone a publicity hound now?” Melly asked.

  “No,” Anny Beth said. “Not you and me.”

  Melly shook her head and tried to remember when she had first noticed people becoming such exhibitionists. She’d heard of people having their own Web sites back in the early years of the twenty-first century, where they kept cameras trained on themselves twenty-four hours a day. But that had been a rare occurrence; back then, even celebrities had tried to avoid the cameras sometimes. Nowadays everyone seemed to want to reveal everything about themselves to the entire world, and modern technology had practically made that possible. It made no sense to Melly, because the extreme exposure often got people in trouble. The police had only to scroll the public-access video sites to catch criminals; divorce courts never had to prove adultery, because it was always on tape. Melly shivered thinking about what her and Anny Beth’s lives would be like if their secret were ever exposed. They’d never have a moment’s peace.

  Anny Beth lost interest in the camera crew. “So,” she said. “It’s your birthday. Sweet sixteen and never been kissed.”

  It was an old-fashioned saying, one Melly hadn’t heard in years. Unbidden, tears sprang to her eyes as she remembered all the kisses she’d be forgetting now. She and Roy had started dating when she was fifteen. They’d exchanged their first shy kisses under the apple tree on Roy’s father’s farm the day he proposed. . . .

  “Don’t do that,” Anny Beth pleaded. “I’m sorry. I can’t take you getting mushy on me.”

  Melly brushed the tears away and grimaced. “Do you ever regret not volunteering for the Cure?” she asked.

  “You mean, do I wish I were dead? Of course not.”

  “Maybe it would have worked for us—”

  Anny Beth made a face. “I doubt it. And it wasn’t worth the risk to find out. Is this birthday getting to you? Remember—you’ve got a lot of good life ahead of you. At least, I do, and I want you to keep me company in it.”

  Melly couldn’t help smiling at Anny Beth’s mocking selfishness. But she couldn’t match Anny Beth’s banter. “Maybe the agency’s right,” she said.

  “Them? Never,” Anny Beth said reflexively. She took a huge bite of hamburger, sucking in a dangling strand of onion like someone reeling in a fishing line.

  “No, really,” Melly said. “What are we going to do when—you know. When you can’t drive anymore. When we get too short to reach the top cabinets in the kitchen. When we forget how to tie our shoes. When I’m back in diapers—” She was whispering now, partly because she didn’t want anyone to overhear, and partly because the tears were threatening to come back.

  “First of all, start taking the bus,” Anny Beth said, chewing on the onion. “Use the step stool. Wear Velcro shoes.”

  “And the other?” Melly spoke so softly she knew Anny Beth couldn’t hear her. But Anny Beth knew what she meant.

  “That’s years away. You were potty trained pretty young, weren’t you?”

  Melly grimaced and didn’t answer.

  Anny Beth placed her hamburger down on her plate with unusual care. “Look, I know it’s not going to be easy. But it’s not worth ruining our lives now with fretting. We’ll worry about that when the time comes. We’ll think of something. I assure you, I have no intention of going back to any sort of institution. I lost too much of the other end of my life in one of them places.”

  Melly always knew Anny Beth was totally serious when she slipped back into bad grammar. It was sort of comforting. But Melly refused to be comforted. “Fine,” she said. “You fiddle while Rome burns. I’m going to find someone to take care of us.”

  “Tonight?” Anny Beth asked.

  “Soon,” Melly said. She hated it when Anny Beth deflated her grand pronouncements.

  “Shouldn’t it be ‘fiddle while Rome unburns’?” Anny Beth asked. “Because that’s pretty much what we’re doing. Ever watch a fire video on rewind? It’s really awesome to see a house put itself back together. . . .”

  Melly let Anny Beth’s chatter envelop her like a cocoon. Anny Beth was probably right—she should just enjoy herself tonight. But tomorrow—she’d start her search tomorrow.

  March 26, 2001

  Amelia rolled her chair up to the dinner table in her usual spot beside Mrs. Flick. The fifty Project Turnabout volunteers had been at the agency for three months now, and they’d broken down into cliques just like kids at school. It hadn’t happened that way at Amelia’s old nursing home, because there was always someone new arriving or someone old dying. But no one had died at the agency. And they certainly never saw anyone new. Just the same handful of nurses and doctors and aides. It reminded Amelia of growing up in the hills of Kentucky. She could remember only two or three times in her entire childhood when she’d met an outsider.

  But there had been no o
ne like Mrs. Flick around when Amelia was growing up.

  Amelia wasn’t quite sure why she and Mrs. Flick had hit it off. If the agency had been a school, Mrs. Flick would have been the unofficial leader and class clown and Most Likely to Get Into Trouble all at once. She was the one everyone else talked about—or would have, except that she herself liked to do most of the talking. And somehow she always knew everything that was going on. She was off the stretcher now and in a wheelchair once more, but still—how did the wheelchair make her so mobile that she seemed to know what Dr. Reed and Dr. Jimson were thinking before they knew themselves?

  “You hear what the meeting’s about tonight?” Amelia asked, leaning back while the attendant placed a plate of food in front of her.

  “Our families. Again,” Mrs. Flick said, her eyes rolled skyward in disdain. At 102, she was the oldest at the agency but somehow managed to seem the most youthful.

  “I miss my Morty and Angeline,” Mrs. Swanson whined across the table. “Why, oh, why won’t they let me see them?”

  Mrs. Swanson was afflicted with a flair for melodrama.

  “Nobody’s stopping you, toots,” Mrs. Flick shot back. “There’s a pay phone in the hallway. Why don’t you use it?”

  Amelia decided to stay out of the discussion. She took a bite of her chicken à la king.

  “But they don’t want us to contact our families,” Mrs. Swanson said with a sniff. “I don’t know how you were raised”—the look down her nose made it clear she had some definite ideas—“but I have always shown proper respect for authority. After they’ve been so kind as to save our lives, I believe it’s my duty to—”